Member of Technical Staff - Model Optimization and Inference (Experienced)
About the role
What we're looking for?
We are seeking an experienced ML Infrastructure/Systems Engineer with at least 2 years of full-time experience in building and maintaining production-level ML systems. You should be comfortable designing scalable infrastructure from scratch, making informed design decisions by comparing various technologies, and have a track record of optimizing systems for latency, throughput, and cost. We're looking for someone with a broad understanding of the ML infra space, including inference infrastructure, real-time video streaming, and data engineering, who can own complex projects and debug distributed systems. Bonus points if you have experience with video or audio models and low-level optimization techniques like CUDA kernels.
What you'll do:
- Own end-to-end inference optimization across our model stack — LLMs, audio models, and diffusion-based components
- Implement and tune KV cache strategies for long-context conversations, including eviction policies, compression, and memory-efficient attention
- Evaluate, deploy, and extend inference serving frameworks (vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, etc.) for our specific workloads
- Profile and benchmark end-to-end latency and throughput; identify and systematically eliminate bottlenecks
- Build internal tooling that makes optimization work faster and more rigorous — profiling viewers, end-to-end inference test harnesses, and other infrastructure that helps the team move quickly
- Accelerate diffusion model inference — consistency models, step distillation, caching strategies, and custom kernel optimizations
- Apply and develop quantization techniques (INT8, INT4, GPTQ, AWQ, and beyond) to reduce memory footprint and increase throughput without meaningfully degrading quality
- Work closely with research and infrastructure to ensure new models ship with optimized serving from day one
About Nuance Labs
Nuance Labs is building photorealistic, real-time AI avatars with emotional intelligence: a full-duplex audiovisual system that can listen, speak, react, interrupt, and respond like a real person.
We're a research company, with PhDs from MIT, UW, Oxford, CMU, and Johns Hopkins, and industry experience from Apple, Meta, Amazon AGI, and Discord. The team is small, the work is real, and the problems are unsolved.
How Nuance Differentiates
Most conversational AI avatars today are hacks — a face slapped on a speech-to-speech pipeline, stuck in the uncanny valley: emotionless, mechanical, one-turn-at-a-time. Current systems take 2–5 seconds to respond; natural conversation requires sub-500ms. That's a 10x improvement, and it demands rethinking the entire stack.
That rethinking starts with full-duplex: an AI that listens and speaks simultaneously, perceives emotion in real time, and responds with a face that actually reflects it. It's an extremely hard problem, and we're developing foundation models designed for it from the ground up.
Required skills
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Job details
Salary
$250,000 - $350,000
Location
Seattle, United States
Experience
2+ years
Funding
Total raised
$60M
Last stage
Series A
Investors
What happens next.
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.
